To Charles Augustus Strong
Hôtel de Milan
Rome. November 8, 1912
Yesterday I received Holt & Co’s “New Realism”, and I have read Holt’s contribution to it (the vile diction and tone of which set my teeth on edge) because, odious as he is personally, Holt has always seemed to me more able and clear-headed than the rest of his school. He is very hard on our nice little friend Drake—calls him an idiot, ignoramus, or some thing of that sort. However, we are almost all of us in that class, according to Holt, so that it is no wonder. This article actually makes me understand a little better how the realists can get on without any mind at all. Except the universal one which they assume but won’t for worlds admit that they assume. “Objects” are enlarged to include their external relations and effects—and it is part of the atmosphere of an object, in action and reaction with other objects, that various groups or apperceptions of its elements are formed about it. These are our perceptions of it—the cotton-wool, so to speak, in which it is wrapped, like planets in clouds. That seems all very well: but I wonder how objects are individuated in such a world.
Perhaps they aren’t individuated at all; and then the new realism would be as mystical as Bergson.—I will write again in a few days.
Yours ever, G.S.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY